


taming a beast doesn't make it human

by ruinarn



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Gen, Snake being a parent, abuse of Jack London metaphors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-11
Updated: 2015-09-11
Packaged: 2018-04-20 06:38:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4777268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ruinarn/pseuds/ruinarn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prodded by Otacon, Snake ends up taking his own advice about passing something on to the future.</p>
            </blockquote>





	taming a beast doesn't make it human

**Author's Note:**

> Please narrow your browser window to read this. Holy /crap/, dialogue-based fic looks terrible off Tumblr.

“I was thinking,” Otacon says from over at his computer, which is rarely a good sign. Snake rolls over on the cot, lifts his head, and rubs the sleep out of his eyes.

Otacon gives him a worried look. It’s probably about how much he’s napping lately, the aging catching up to him. He ignores it. Groans, stretches a stiff shoulder. It doesn’t help– never does. Damn joints.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Otacon echoes. “Remember what you said way back, about finding something to believe in? Something to pass on to the next generation?”

“What about it?”

Otacon seems to consider, then words the statement carefully. “Do you ever think you should live by your own advice?”

Snake snorts out a breath through his nose. What a stupid thing to wake him up for. “I’ve got nothing to pass on. Not genes, and not ideas. You know that, Otacon.”

Otacon lets out a long sigh, pushes up his glasses. “Look, I know you were manufactured as well as you do. But that doesn’t make your experience fabricated. You can’t tell me that in your whole life, there’s not one thing that meant something, had meaning just to you?”

“No,” Snake answers, bluntly. “There’s nothing.”

Otacon’s voice drops, serious. “Snake. I wouldn’t be your friend if that were true.”

“Fine. Even if I did,” A stern tone makes clear that this is strictly hypothetical. “What right would I have to pass it on?”

“It’s your right as a human being that lives in this world,” The answer is easy, nonchalant, and Snake is forcibly reminded of exactly how artificial Otacon thinks he’s not.

“You’re missing the point of the whole ‘manufactured’ thing.” he snaps, more harshly than he means to.

That kills the conversation effectively for a long moment.

“Well, if you won’t do it for yourself…” Otacon trails off, pointedly not looking at him anymore. “Do it for me, all right?”

“What?”

“Leave something behind so when you’re gone, I’ll see it and know you were alive. As proof that you existed.”

There’s nothing Snake can really say to that, with Otacon’s back still turned to him, trying and failing to conceal the way his hands shake with grief.

—

It takes some time to come up with anything. The most obvious and available target for passing on is Sunny, if he’s actually going to comply with Otacon’s request (and how can he not, if it’s somehow going to help the guy though his eventual death). But the thing to be passed itself proves harder.

He thinks for a long time, tries to find a part of himself that no one else knows or has ever owned. There’s not much. He eventually the feeling of cool metal in his palms. The taste of cigarettes. The sight of the sky in Alaska one mid-February night. All sense-memories, internal representations of things he could never possibly communicate, unless–

Well, there was that. That could work. And if she didn’t end up getting much out of it, Otacon couldn’t exactly blame him for it.

—

Sunny lets out a startled yelp when he abruptly drops a dusty box of battered paperbacks next to her computer.

“S-snake?” she manages, pulling off her headphones, then looks down. “W-what are those?”

”Books,” he answers. She gives him the most petulant look imaginable, so he elaborates. “An old master of mine gave them to me a long time ago. Thought you’d like 'em.”

She stares at him warily, pulls a leg underneath her tiny body, considers. God, he’d have thought she’d have grown more than she has by now, it never stops surprising him how small she was, still is.

“Why are you giving me these? Aren’t t-they yours?” There’s an edge of suspicion to her voice, and she scowls when he doesn’t answer immediately.

He puts it together a moment later. Sunny thinks he’s giving away his possessions like he’s about to die, some kind of last will and testament. She’s not entirely wrong, but he feels an obligation to create a believable half-truth, regardless. Maybe Otacon could handle this, but Sunny was a different matter entirely.

“Look at 'em,” Snake gestures at the books finally, awkwardly. “How many times do you think I’ve read these?”

Sunny continues to glower disbelievingly at him. He continues on, albeit a little less convincingly in the face of her childish glare.

“At least thirty. Could probably tell you the first page from memory. There’s no point in me reading them again then, right?”

She picks up the top book, still looking at him, and he groans.

“Fine. Which one is that, Call of the Wild?” She squints at the title, but he recognizes the cover and recites anyway. “Uh, hmm…” She huffs impatiently, he rolls his eyes. “Yeah. 'Buck no lee los periódicos, o habría sabido que algo se estaba tramando, no solo para él, pero…’ aahhh. Come on, that’s good enough. Right?”

The disbelief on her face cracks away slowly, reveals something like amazement instead. Honestly, he’s impressed with himself. No Alzheimer’s here, apparently.

“Was that Spanish?” she whispers, awed.

“Yeah,” He grins, fond with memory. “Master had a reputation for talking business in it. Wanted to pass it on.”

Sunny nods, understanding, then wrinkles her nose. “S-so he just gave you a book? In Spanish? He didn’t t-teach you or anything?”

“No, gave me a dictionary, too.” A beat, considering. “Come to think of it, probably wasn’t the best way to learn.”  
–  
He dreams of bullets and gunfire and snapping necks, which he imagines isn’t doing his frail vascular system any favors, but if cortisol kills him now it’d probably be appropriate, considering.

It’s not like he doesn’t know how to deal with PTSD. Or rather, the worst of it is over and every other horror in the universe pales in comparison to burning your father alive. Either way, he’s gotten slightly more sane in his old age, for all that trying to dismantle nuclear weapons while practically on your deathbed counts for sane. But there are still dreams.

The strangest dreams were the drunk ones, in Alaska. Maybe they weren’t dreams, he wasn’t asleep or was too drunk to tell the difference, but there’s nothing else to call hazy memories of dogs and wolves ripping each other apart limb from limb, blood splattering the snow in slashes as they ate the steaming remains of their distant cousins down to the last sickening crunch of bone. Sometimes, it was the dogs. Usually, it was the wolves, bitter and starving, that went for the weak underside and struck with all it took. It bothered him, when it was the wolves.

After the dreams, he’d always gotten up and counted the dogs, each one accounted for every time.

—

Anyone would have thought Sunny’d have given up by now, but there she was, curled up in front of her desk with Babelfish open in a window as she powered though the damn Complete Short Stories of Jack London. Occasionally, she checked a word, but for the most part, she just appeared to be reading, albeit slowly. She didn’t even seem to be taking notes.

It seemed, at best, impossible, considering the vocabulary level of the material.

“I’ve been telling you she’s a genius for years. You know how fast she hacks through the child locks on her internet?” Otacon whisper-yells in the kitchen, gesticulating wildly. “I don’t know how you’re surprised by this.”

“Yeah,” Snake grunts, glancing down the ladder with a watchful eye. “But I thought you were just bragging. I didn’t read French 'till I was seven.”

—  
He remembers his first dog. Well, he remembers all of them, but the first one feels like more of an achievement considering how drunk he’d been at the time.

There’d been a girl, god, not much older than Sunny, tasked by her father to put down an animal that’d bitten a staff member. Something about life lessons and letting go. He’d been asked to get the damn thing out of the cage, and he remembers asking– why did it have such yellow eyes?

“It’s half wolf,” she’d answered. “Or maybe more, we can’t tell, but ’s enough to hurt somebody anyway.”

His first mistake had been doing it from inside the cage instead of outside. His second had been assuming that glistening white fangs couldn’t rip through rope. It charged. He’d hit it elbow-first, gripped it around the throat and held with all his strength.

The beast had been an inch from his face, his throat, snarling and flinging drops of saliva across his jugular but he had it first, stared it in the eyes waiting for it to surrender. It didn’t. Even as it succumbed to oxygen deprivation its eyes dropped slowly, gradually, as if fighting it every step of the way.

Hell, taking the thing home after that had seemed like a great idea at the time. That was all he really had to say for himself on that one. Even if the damn thing had bitten him twice, made its home under the end table, and proceeded to piss on everything he owned.

–

“I didn’t know you used to own sled dogs!” Sunny bounds up to him excitedly, finger still stuck halfway through White Fang.

“Been talking to Otacon, then?” he grouses, good-naturedly.

“Yeah! S-so if I asked you if we could get a husky–”

“No,” comes the immediate answer, and Sunny pouts spectacularly. “For the same reason Otacon probably told you.”

“I don’t know why it n-needs to go outside,” she whines. “I don’t go outside.”

“You also don’t shed or chew up shoes, which is why we keep you around.”

“H-hey!”

—

The real question is if passing something like this along to Sunny means passing along his sins as well, but he likes to think that those stop with his dead end genes. It’s an unfair and skewed way of thinking, but it lets him sleep at night, so he accepts the lie a little longer. Not like it’ll need to be long, at the rate his lungs are going.

Maybe he’s an inhuman, artificial beast after all, a vehicle that bridged the gap between her and Miller while keeping nothing for himself, but he knows better than to voice that thought to Otacon. Sometimes, lies are better than the truth.

—

“What does this say?” Sunny asks, nudging Snake in the side as she begins to read aloud. “’El Salvaje aún perviv--'”

“It says,” he answers, softly, “The Wild still lingered in him, and the wolf in him merely slept”.


End file.
